Word: thinker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...describe Vladimir Tallin as a product of Communism [Aug. 9] is incorrect. He was a rebel and a free thinker. I knew Tallin in the mid-thirties, in the days when Russian men of culture were slaughtered in the name of international Communism. I last saw him in his tiny one-room apartment in Moscow, which was dominated by a huge black and white canvas entitled The Fish Merchant and Fish. Neither merchant nor fish were in evidence-it was hardly an example of having "knuckled under" to Communist social realism. We drank tea and listened to Tallin playing...
...youthful nihilists denounced the entire span of French history as irrelevant. Their harsh judgment did not surprise him. In five slim volumes of pel lucid, painfully distilled essays, Rumanian-born Philosopher E. M. Cioran, 57, has argued the terrible futility of human history. More originally than any other living thinker, he has defined the case for total pessimism. "Human history is an immense cul-de-sac," he says. "For me, life is a passionate emptiness, an intriguing nothingness...
Cioran's first book published in the U.S., The Temptation to Exist (Quadrangle; $5), presents his dark vision in a series of highly personal, paradoxical meditations that almost defy criticism and can only be categorically accepted or rejected. An unsystematic thinker who refers to his essays as "fragments," Cioran (pronounced Cho-ran) presents his arguments in ironic, aphoristic prose (see box). It is rather as if Dostoevsky had written Notes from Underground in the style of Pascal's Pensees. Although his gloom has affinities, with existentialism, Cioran is hard to pigeon hole; his eclectic thought contains echoes...
...young Trudeau-bopper for a kiss, can respond: "Why not? It's spring." A broad-minded and cultured member of academe, he also canoes, exhibits championship-caliber diving, practices yoga, loves driving fast cars and, as a bachelor, can command the company of beautiful women. A serious political thinker with some unusual views of Canada's future, he has nonetheless answered hecklers with an impudent "so's your old man." He dresses with a style and extreme casualness that stands out in Canada. After a trip to India in 1949, Trudeau wore a turban for a while...
Lynd concedes that the ultimate risk of this position invites "generalized disrespect for law," but he slides away from consequences. When in doubt, he radiates an unqualified trust in the natural goodness and perfectibility of man that makes such an early wishful-thinker as Rousseau look like a cynic...